I am of the opinion that the probability of someone watching a timelapse webcam video of weather for more than 60 seconds is highly unlikely unless you are capturing a flood or massive snowstorm. Just watching clouds stream by gets old fast.

I see your point, but perhaps these sort of videos will never be of much interest to the general public unless they capture something unusual. I daily video takes about 4 minutes. If I'm interested in that particular day, I'll gladly sit through it. Otherwise I won't bother at all and I suppose most of your website visitors will do the same. The newbie might start sitting through one just to understand what sort of a video this is. Once they are satisfied they'll move on. I don't see any harm in having longer videos. Should you capture something unique, you'll be glad to have a longer video to share. The rest of the time, your website visitors will mostly ignore it and you will delete the leftover files to recover the disk space.

We had a leaking transformer between our house and a neighbor. I called the electric company and reported it. They were here within 45 minutes and it took only another 45 for a new transformer to arrive (they don't usually drive around with these above-ground, but ground-level transformers) and be installed! I should have called months ago! I can still not believe how quickly they responded! Fortunately, the leaking one was built after they started using mineral oil instead of the highly toxic oil used before 1980.

Yes, you should have reported the leak as soon as you observed it. It could have been a transformer with toxic PCB oil. A few years back I noticed a fallen branch on a power line and reported it. It was gone in a few hours. Utilities really need to hop when the issue is one of public safety.

I bumped up the capture to 2 minutes and the inter-frame fade to 70% late last night. Today's movies are ~ 18.6Mb compared to the 10.9 yesterday. Roughly a 70% increase, but that includes the 50% increase in images captured. Solid clouds all day. All I can see is the movement of the trees in the gusty winds. Grass is still mostly dormant, not much activity there. I'll probably kill the fade and leave the capture rate. At least until the grass starts growing faster.

OTOH, it was interesting to watch a landscaping crew re-working the back yard a couple of days ago. I can't show the the vids as I did not get releases from them.

Just an update on file size and the inter-frame fade function. As Stu alerted us, that function can increase file size considerably. My less-than-scientific-and-capture-rate "data":

No fade capture, 3 min capture rate: ~750Kb

Fade rate of 30%, 3 min capture rate: ~11 Mb

Fade rate of 70%, 2 min capture rate: ~18.5Mb

Fade rate of 100%, 2 min capture rate: ~26.5Mb

The effect is subtle, even at 100%. But is makes the changes much easier on the eyes, should they be watching the movie for any length of time. Without the fading or with less than 30%, the movies has mainly a 'stop-action' effect. Each frame simply get replaced by the next one. As one increases the fade, the frames start to simply dissolve one after another. Beyond 70%, the fading is as professional looking as we can probably achieve, probably equal to anything you might see in a movie/TV show.

Of course, the size of the file does increase considerably, and yet I have seen no "FTP Overload" messages. But I do have a fairly good interweb connection. Web space, at my host, is not a problem.

All in all, the improvements in WC3, especially in the video area, are outstanding! Thanks, again, Stu!

Maybe the next version of WC will feature multiple-camera support! Meanwhile, I'll probably dial back the fade to 70%... at least until the grass starts to really grow!

This feature is working very well. Most recently I changed my settings to 60 second capture image with 5 seconds per hour of playing time per hour captured, resulting in a 26.5 MB daily movie file. I like this better because it seems to have eliminated the lag time when playing the larger movie on my iPhone. The movies at all settings have played fine on my iMac but the larger files have a loading lag on iOS. Here is a summary of my tested settings and the resulting file sizes so far.

Meanwhile, I'll probably dial back the fade to 70%... at least until the grass starts to really grow!

. . . Never mind that!! Will somebody please find the setting in WeatherCat that controls how fast the grass grow? . . . Today's high was 57.8˚ F (14.3˚ C). However by the weekend, the highs are supposed to be 76˚ F (24.4˚ C) and I know what the grass is going to start doing! I don't even have fresh gas for the lawn mower! . . . . . . . . . .

Maybe you can siphon some of that antique gas in the Buick?! OTOH, that gas may be too powerful of that little mower!!!

. . . . . All gone! No Mor'! . . . . .

Sadly, I'm getting better at this mothballing the car routine. As soon as brought the wagon home, I bought myself a fancy gas siphon and drained as much as I could from the tank. I'll need to find a moment to run over to a local gas station and put 1 gallon in the portable container. That's usually enough to last the entire season.